The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

Well over a thousand pages, three volumes in one, and strangely riveting for the interested reader. Olivia Manning demonstrates great skill in description of place and people, her characterisations are funny and perceptive and depicted with both strengths and weaknesses. Harriet Pringle meets and marries Guy Pringle over a three-week period while he is on leave before being posted to a position with the ‘Organisation’ in Bucharest on the outbreak of WW2. Manning’s description of society and its descent into chaos are both moving and quirky. The Ruritanian politics and the snobbery of the various elites, both foreign and local, are related with subtle mockery, particularly the academic snobbery of the British community. The slow build up of tension as the time of evacuation approaches and the sudden disappearance of some of the characters is telling.

Many of the British evacuated from Bucharest as the Germans occupied the country find themselves together again in Athens with all their individual prejudices intact and a stark contrast is drawn between the solid, uncomplaining stalwarts like Guy and Dobson, and the nefarious hangers-on such as Lush and Dubedat. When Greece itself becomes embroiled in the war, successfully beating back the Italian forces but then quickly succumbing to a more clinical German assault even with the help of an undermanned and ill-equipped British-led expeditionary force, Harriet and Guy are evacuated once again, this time to Egypt, but it is all touch and go and beset by the stupidity of ‘class division’.

The trilogy describes war from the civilian point-of-view, an interested but powerless civilian with all its terror, pain, sadness and pointlessness, and is particularly poignant in recounting the sudden demise of the Pringle’s most unreliable friend, Prince Yakimov. As ever, money talks, and those with money talk loudest in their own best interests. Manning has created a wonderful evocation of a certain type of Englishness at a particular moment in history, full of eccentrics, scroungers, scoundrels and snobs, a largely bygone age but one that deserves to be remembered. Particularly interesting is the way Manning uses the character of Harriet with all her insecurities to reveal some of the minor characters, for example: ‘Looking at Sophie’s well developed bosom, Harriet felt at a disadvantage. Perhaps Sophie’s shape would not last, but it was enviable while it lasted.’ Manning has a equally perceptive eye for weak men: ‘Glancing up, Harriet found Clarence’s gaze fixed on her. He looked away at once but he had caught her attention. She noted his long, lean face with its long nose, and felt it unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory and unsatisfied.’ Clarence becomes her companion of sorts, someone to talk to when Guy is busy with work, but like Sasha and later, Charles, their company is preferable to being alone, they are condemned as inadequate and immature. No other man can measure up to Guy with all his obvious faults.